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Aberdaron Swell Statistics, Summer: Surf with Light or Offshore Winds

This image shows only the swells directed at Aberdaron that coincided with light winds or offshore conditions through a typical northern hemisphere summer. It is based on 7261 predictions, one every 3 hours. The direction of the spokes show where quality surf generating swell comes from. Five colours show increasing wave sizes. The smallest swells, less than 0.5m (1.5 feet), high are coloured blue. Green and yellow show increasing swell sizes and largest swells greater than >3m (>10ft) are shown in red. In both graphs, the area of any colour is proportional to how often that size swell occurs.

The diagram indicates that the dominant swell direction, shown by the largest spokes, was WSW (which was the same as the most common wind direction). The chart at the bottom shows the same thing but without direction information. For example, swells larger than 1.5 feet (0.5m) coincided with good wind conditions 0% of the time, equivalent to 0 days. Open sea swells exceeding >3m (>10ft) are unlikely to happen in a normal northern hemisphere summer. Taking into account the proportion of these swells that coincided with forecast offshore winds, and given the fact that Aberdaron is slightly protected from open water swells, we estimate that clean surf can be found at Aberdaron about 0% of the time and that surf is spoilt by onshore wind 12% of the time. This is means that we expect 11 days with waves in a typical northern hemisphere summer, of which 0 days should be surfable.

IMPORTANT: Beta version feature! Swell heights are open water values from NWW3. There is no attempt to model near-shore effects. Coastal wave heights will generally be less, especially if the break does not have unobstructed exposure to the open ocean.